Raise your hand if you’ve ever ground up the antlers of a deer and ingested the velvet for its performance-enhancing effect. Good, looks like we’re not alone here. Apparently ingesting deer antler spray is the latest rage among baseball players. So much so that MLB actually has issued a warning against players, according to Tom Verducci at SI.com.
Verducci writes that “chemists have figured out that the velvet from immature deer antlers includes insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, which mediates the level of human growth hormone in the body, and is also banned by MLB and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among others, for its muscle-building and fat-cutting effects.”
The best part about antler spray, if you’re so inclined, is that it cannot be detected by urine tests. So if you thought that baseball players weren’t juicing just because MLB is now testing, you were wrong. Players are just coming up with more creative ways to get around the tests. Next thing you know they’ll be doing this to get an edge.
